Thinking cool is one thing … being cool another
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 5, 2020
- 955
When you’re 10 years old, it’s hard to look cool.
For one thing, you’re just a kid.
For another, you’re not really sure what cool is.
The only truth is that it’s not an appellation you can apply to yourself.
Cool is in the eye of the beholder.
Looking back from a considerable distance, though, and giving myself a break for not having exploited it at the time, I think I might have actually attained cool without even knowing it.
This, probably, is a thread that has run through the course of my years as a human being, one that isn’t so much sad as it is strange.
It’s all about context, so let’s take an impromptu inventory.
In the winter 1965, I was a fourth-grade student at the only Catholic elementary school in the county. I was a newly minted altar boy, having memorized more Latin than baseball stats. I had made a few friends in the neighborhood, and we had a clubhouse — actually just an abandoned shotgun shack off the alley that ran parallel to the street we lived on — and we could get a bottle of pop at the gas station for a dime.
Beyond that, the public library was within walking distance, as was the college where Dad taught. There was a wonderful municipal park that hosted fireworks and had a skating rink, trains and buses stopped downtown and, remarkably, everybody knew everybody.
This was a departure, something I was just getting used to, having spent my first nine years in the capital city, where I wasn’t cool.
You know who was cool, though?
Karl Pace.
Funny how I still remember his name. If I put my mind to it and test my ever-diminishing memory cells, I can still reel off my k-3 teachers, but it’s not as easy as it once was. That’ll happen when you’re nearly 60 years down that road.
But I have no such trouble with Karl Pace.
From his Bryl-creamed pompadour to the heels of his Cuban boots, he slouched when he walked, a click-clicking sound marking his approach as we all watched from the playground, awestruck.
He was like Omar in “The Wire,” the epitome of something ineffably and unhurriedly hip, something rare, something so translucently tangible there was only one word that applied.
Karl Pace was cool.
But here’s the thing: Instead of a black leather jacket and greasy peg-legged blue jeans, he could have been wearing a varsity letter sweater and pleated grey chinos and he’d have had the same effect.
Cool can’t be bought.
It can only exist in the ether of otherness and others’ observations.
Which brings us back to my 10-year-old self, a youngster so gangling and gawky that he hated going swimming because he was so skinny, boasting a string-bean physique so frail and skeletal that big kids would say things like, “Careful out there, scarecrow. Strong wind comes along, it’ll blow you into the next county.”
I didn’t have a cool bone in my body, and you could see almost all of them.
But life wasn’t all insults and taunts. As I’ve said, I had a cadre of close friends, and we sheltered ourselves from the prying eyes of adults in our clubhouse, which may have reeked of rank decay and rotting wood but offered a proper sanctuary to us misfits.
We plotted pranks that we seldom executed, though I still remember the abject fear I felt when a little fire we started using yellowed newspapers and fallen leaves threatened to engulf us all.
And then there was the time that someone — it might have been me — came up with the bright idea to shoplift candy from the drug store downtown, something so stupid that I was happy when we decided, without saying a word, to abort the mission and hang out in Town Creek instead, walking for miles, sloshing in the mud.
Speaking of downtown, that was the scene of something I did that, glancing back over all those years, might have actually been cool.
Feb. 9, 1964, was a Sunday.
I know this as surely as I remember what song was playing when I had my first slow dance — “Love is Blue” by Paul Mauriat — and what record was on the turntable when I got my first kiss: Side A of the Woodstock LP, specifically John Sebastian’s “I Had a Dream Last Night.”
But Feb. 4, 1964, was the Big Bang, the night the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and changed everything.
And I knew as I laid my skinny self to bed that night that the only thing I wanted in the whole wide world was a guitar. So I prayed.
And the next Christmas morning, there it was, a six-string acoustic, its body a burnished bronze, its case lined in plush red velvet, its picks and capo stored snugly in an ingenious hidden compartment.
I began lessons immediately, but just as quickly I realized my instructor and I were on vastly different pages when it came to what I ought to be learning. He was of the opinion that cornpone standards like “Red River Valley” and “Long, Long Ago” were the place to start; whereas all I wanted was to shred chords, committing “My Generation” and “You Really Got Me” to memory.
But like the good Catholic schoolboy I was, I listened to my teacher, and soon enough I was playing songs like “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” for family and friends.
I wasn’t all that good, but then again, neither was my playlist.
My lessons took place in the basement of a music store on Main Street, and sometimes when it was snowing and the traffic was backed up a little, Mom would drop me off on those Saturday afternoons and I’d walk a couple of blocks to be on time.
Now here’s my question: Didn’t I look cool doing that?
I mean there I was, 10 years old, thin as a railroad spike, leaning into the wind, my scarf blowing back, carrying a black guitar case with silver snakeskin highlights, all alone and in charge of my life.
True, my hair wasn’t as long as it would be in a few years, and also true, I would be laying down my guitar forever in favor of a baseball bat come summer, but in that instant, had someone taken the time to notice me, he might have thought to himself, “Cool.”
I like to think it could have been Karl Pace.